African Women and ICTs

This book features the ways in which women in Africa utilise information and communication technologies (ICTs) to facilitate their empowerment, whether through the mobile village phone business, through internet use, or through new career and ICT employment opportunities. Based on the outcome of an extensive research project, this book features chapters based on original primary field research undertaken by academics and activists who have investigated situations within their own communities and countries. The discussion includes such issues as the notion of ICTs for empowerment and as agents of change, ICTs in the fight against gender-based violence, and how ICTs could be used to re-conceptualise public and private spaces.

According to the authors, ICT policy is currently being made and implemented all over Africa, but this is generally happening in the absence of clear knowledge about the ways gender inequality and ICTs are impacting each other. They suggest that, by becoming alert to a gender dimension in ICT development at an early stage of the information revolution, undesirable gender-driven effects of a greater scale may be prevented in the future.